Uneven Evening with Earplay in Noe Valley

Last night the Earplay new music ensemble made its first appearance at the Noe Valley Ministry to perform the second concert in its current season. This suggests that the group has become somewhat peripatetic, since it will return to Old First Presbyterian Church to wrap up its season in May. The title of last night’s program was knock, breathe, shine, which was also the title of the composition by Esa-Pekka Salonen that began the concert. Taken as a whole, that concert was a somewhat uneven affair; but Salonen’s music could not have made for a better opening.

The piece was a three-movement composition for solo cello. The program note was written by a fellow Finn, the cellist Anssi Karttunen, suggesting that Salonen may have composed the work for him to debut. Each of the words in the title corresponds to one of the movements; and Karttunen’s program note explained how each of those words was realized in Salonen’s composition. Last night’s soloist was Earplay cellist Thalia Moore; and she could not have done a better job of turning Karttunen’s commentary into a thoroughly compelling performance.

Sadly, both that performance and the music being performed constituted the high point of the entire evening. The program concluded with the full ensemble giving the world premiere performance of Laura Elise Schwendinger’s “A Flock Ascending,” which was written on an Earplay commission. During the pre-concert discussion, moderated rather awkwardly by Board member Benjamin Sabey, she discussed the influence of Toru Takemitsu’s “A Flock Descends into a Pentagonal Garden.” However, Schwendinger’s “Flock” seemed to add recorded birdsong to an instrumental mix that tended to reflect the four instruments of the Tashi quartet that recorded Takemitsu’s composition for Deutsche Grammophon: piano, violin, cello, and clarinet. She also structured the piece into seven movements, which began to wear on attention long before the halfway mark.

“A Flock Ascending” was preceded by Sofía Rocha’s “Scenes of Night,” last year’s winner of the Earplay Vibrant Shores Prize. One could appreciate the composer’s approach to combining instrumental sonorities. The work was scored for a quartet that paired flute (Jessie Nucho) and clarinet (Peter Josheff) with violin (Terrie Baune) and cello (Vanessa Ruotolo). However, while one could appreciate the overall mood, this was another composition that overstayed its welcome.

In the first half of the program, the three pieces for violin (Baune) and piano (Keisuke Nakagoshi) by British composer Kate Whitley provided an excellent complement to Salonen’s cello music. Between these “bookends,” however, was a far less compelling performance of Richard Festinger’s James Joyce Settings, which triggered no end of muddled talk about the relationship between music and poetry during the pre-concert discussion. Ironically, no one bothered to mention that the three poems that Festinger had set were from a collection that Joyce had entitled Chamber Music. (Mind you, Joyce had a different “chamber” in mind!) The best that can be said is that, in the performance, soprano Winnie Nieh, accompanied at the piano by Brenda Tom, provided a clear account of Joyce’s words; but the relationship between those words and Festinger’s music left me more frustrated than perplexed.